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Comment by maratd | Hacker News Reader

> Seriously, I've seen "average story points per developer per sprint" reported to 2 decimal places as if it's a meaningful number.

Ok, explain this to me. Why is this not a meaningful number?

Story points are essentially hours and generally in the shops I worked in, they are converted to hours. If something takes longer, the hours are adjusted.

So really, that's a metric for maximum hours worked ... why is that not a good metric?

If someone is on a remote team and they're expected to work 40 hours a week, why is measuring the maximum hours they were on the job a bad metric?

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What? No. Glad I don't work for you. Nearly all developers I know estimate time (and storypoints) by some (often linear) function of volume and complexity. Volume estimation is usually not very difficult, but complexity is very tricky (and dynamic too). Estimating developer work hours by any proxy that depends on complexity will introduce a margin of uncertainty so large as fo render the number meaningless.

I'd think by and large you would evalute remote workers by theit work output, not by estimating how much time they've spent.

> I'd think by and large you would evalute remote workers by theit work output

Which is what? Lines of code? I think that's even worse.

How do you determine how much work to assign someone if estimates are meaningless? How do you determine if someone is productive or is doing one hour's work per week?

Aside from insults, I don't really see any answers. Have you ever been in a PM role?

Again, if you adjust estimates as you're doing the work ... as in, it's more complex than you thought, so you adjust the estimate ... why are estimates a bad metric and what metric (something that can be quantified) would you recommend?

Uhm, I think you're reading my post a bit uncharitably. I don't think I insulted you, for instance.

I never said that estimates were meaningless, but they are tools for planning with high intrinsic uncertainty, and translating that uncertainty to evaluations gives unfairness. People are very sensitive to (perceived) unfairness and the idea that they will be treated so will give rise to resentment, not to mention incentives to game the system and overestimate. Hence endless bickering about points.

If agile failed for any reason it was misunderstanding human psychology.

Personally I don't think human performance in creative professions is well suited to quantified analysis, especially when team efforts are involved. So I don't really have an answer there.

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